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Monday, 6 September 2010

I. The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness. This has lost the power to think the unconditional and to endure the conditional. Instead of defining both, in their unity and difference, by conceptual labour, it mixes them indiscriminately. The unconditional becomes fact, the conditional an immediate essence. Monotheism is decomposing into a second mythology. "I believe in astrology because I do not believe in God", one participant in an American socio-psychological investigation answered. Judicious reason, that had elevated itself to the notion of one God, seems ensnared in his fall. Spirit is dissociated into spirits and thereby forfeits the power to recognize that they do not exist. The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in its fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it. Panic breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature.

II. The second mythology is more untrue than the first. The latter was the precipitate of the state of knowledge of successive epochs, each of which showed its consciousness to be some degrees more free of blind subservience to nature than had the previous. The former, deranged and bemused, throws away the hard-won knowledge of itself in the midst of a society which, by the all-encompassing exchange-relationship, eliminates precisely the elemental power the occultists claim to command. The helmsman looking to the Dioscuri, the attribution of animation to tree and spring, in all their deluded bafflement before the unexplained, were historically appropriate to the subject's experience of the objects of his actions. As a rationally exploited reaction to rationalized society, however, in the booths and consulting rooms of seers of all gradations, reborn animism denies the alienation of which it is itself proof and product, and concocts surrogates for non-existent experience. The occultist draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of commodities: menacingly objectified labour assails him on all sides from demonically grimacing objects. What has been forgotten in a world congealed into products, the fact that it has been produced by men, is split off and misremembered as a being-in-itself added to that of the objects and equivalent to them. Because objects have frozen in the cold light of reason, lost their illusory animation, the social quality that now animates them is given an independent existence both natural and supernatural, a thing among things.

III. By its regression to magic under late capitalism, thought is assimilated to late capitalist forms. The asocial twilight phenomena in the margins of the system, the pathetic attempts to squint through the chinks in its walls, while revealing nothing of what is outside, illuminate all the more clearly the forces of decay within. The bent little fortune-tellers terrorizing their clients with crystal balls are toy models of the great ones who hold the fate of mankind in their hands. Just as hostile and conspiratorial as the obscurantists of psychic research is society itself. The hypnotic power exerted by things occult resembles totalitarian terror: in present-day processes the two are merged. The smiling of auguries is amplified to society's sardonic laughter at itself; gloating over the direct material exploitation of souls. The horoscope corresponds to the official directives to the nations, and number-mysticism is preparation for administrative statistics and cartel prices. Integration itself proves in the end to be an ideology for disintegration into power groups which exterminate each other. He who integrates is lost.

IV. Occultism is a reflex-action to the subjectification of all meaning, the complement of reification. If; to the living, objective reality seems deaf as never before, they try to elicit meaning from it by saying abracadabra. Meaning is attributed indiscriminately to the next worst thing: the rationality of the real, no longer quite convincing, is replaced by hopping tables and rays from heaps of earth. The offal of the phenomenal world becomes, to sick consciousness, the mundus intelligibilis. It might almost be speculative truth, just as Kafka's Odradek might almost be an angel, and yet it is, in a positivity that excludes the medium of thought, only barbaric aberration alienated from itself, subjectivity mistaking itself for its object. The more consummate the inanity of what is fobbed off as "spirit" -- and in anything less spiritless the enlightened subject would at once recognize itself, -- the more the meaning detected there, which in fact is not there at all, becomes an unconscious, compulsive projection of a subject decomposing historically if not clinically. It would like to make the world resemble its own decay: therefore it has dealings with requisites and evil wishes. "The third one reads out of my hand,/ She wants to read my doom!" In occultism the mind groans under its own spell like someone in a nightmare, whose torment grows with the feeling that he is dreaming yet cannot wake up.

V. The power of occultism, as of Fascism, to which it is connected by thought-patterns of the ilk of anti-semitism, is not only pathic. Rather it lies in the fact that in the lesser panaceas, as in superimposed pictures, consciousness famished for truth imagines it is grasping a dimly present knowledge diligently denied to it by official progress in all its forms. It is the knowledge that society, by virtually excluding the possibility of spontaneous change, is gravitating towards total catastrophe. The real absurdity is reproduced in the astrological hocus-pocus, which adduces the impenetrable connections of alienated elements -- nothing more alien than the stars -- as knowledge about the subject. The menace deciphered in the constellations resembles the historical threat that propagates itself precisely through unconsciousness, absence of subjects. That all are prospective victims of a whole made up solely of themselves, they can only make bearable by transferring that whole to something similar but external. In the woeful idiocy they practice, their empty horror, they are able to vent their impracticable woe, their crass fear of death, and yet continue to repress it, as they must if they wish to go on living. The break in the line of life that indicates a lurking cancer is a fraud only in the place where it purports to be found, the individual's hand; where they refrain from diagnosis, in the collective, it would be correct. Occultists rightly feel drawn towards childishly monstrous scientific fantasies. The confusion they sow between their emanations and the isotopes of uranium is ultimate clarity. The mystical rays are modest anticipations of technical ones. Superstition is knowledge, because it sees together the ciphers of destruction scattered on the social surface; it is folly, because in all its death-wish it still clings to illusions: expecting from the transfigured shape of society misplaced in the skies an answer that only a study of real society can give.

VI. Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces. The mediocrity of the mediums is no more accidental than the apocryphal triviality of the revelations. Since the early days of spiritualism the Beyond has communicated nothing more significant than the dead grandmother's greetings and the prophecy of an imminent journey. The excuse that the world of spirits can convey no more to poor human reason than the latter can take in, is equally absurd, an auxiliary hypothesis of the paranoiac system; the lumen naturale has, after all, taken us somewhat further than the journey to grandmother, and if the spirits do not wish to acknowledge this, they are ill-mannered hobgoblins with whom it is better to break off all dealings. The platitudinously natural content of the supernatural message betrays its untruth. In pursuing yonder what they have lost, they encounter only the nothing they have. In order not to lose touch with the everyday dreariness in which, as irremediable realists, they are at home, they adapt the meaning they revel in to the meaninglessness they flee. The worthless magic is nothing other than the worthless existence it lights up. This is what makes the prosaic so cosy. Facts which differ from what is the case only by not being facts are trumped up as a fourth dimension. Their non-being alone is their qualitas occulta. They supply simpletons with a world outlook. With their blunt, drastic answers to every question, the astrologists and spiritualists do not so much solve problems as remove them by crude premisses from all possibility of solution. Their sublime realm, conceived as analogous to space, no more needs to be thought than chairs and flower-vases. It thus reinforces conformism. Nothing better pleases what is there than that being there should, as such, be meaning.

VII. The great religions have either, like Judaism after the ban on graven images, veiled the redemption of the dead in silence, or preached the resurrection of the flesh. They take the inseparability of the spiritual and physical seriously. For them there was no intention, nothing "spiritual", that was not somehow founded in bodily perception and sought bodily fulfilment. To the occultists, who consider the idea of resurrection beneath them, and actually do not want to be saved, this is too coarse. Their metaphysics, which even Huxley can no longer distinguish from metaphysics, rest on the axiom: "The soul can soar to the heights, heigh-ho, / the body stays put on the sofa below." The heartier the spirituality, the more mechanistic: not even Descartes drew the line so cleanly. Division of labour and reification are taken to the extreme: body and soul severed in a kind of perennial vivisection. The soul is to shake the dust off its feet and in brighter regions forthwith resume its fervent activity at the exact point where it was interrupted. In this declaration of independence, however, the soul becomes a cheap imitation of that from which it had achieved a false emancipation. In place of the interaction that even the most rigid philosophy admitted, the astral body is installed, ignominious concession of hypostasized spirit to its opponent. Only in the metaphor of the body can the concept of pure spirit be grasped at all, and is at the same time cancelled. In their reification the spirits are already negated.

VIII. They inveigh against materialism. But they want to weigh the astral body. The objects of their interest are supposed at once to transcend the possibility of experience, and be experienced. Their procedure is to be strictly scientific; the greater the humbug, the more meticulously the experiment is prepared. The self-importance of scientific checks is taken ad absurdum where there is nothing to check. The same rationalistic and empiricist apparatus that threw the spirits out is being used to reimpose them on those who no longer trust their own reason. As if any elemental spirit would not turn tail before the traps that domination of nature sets for such fleeting beings. But even this the occultists turn to advantage. Because the spirits do not like controls, in the midst of all the safety precautions a tiny door must be left open, through which they can make their unimpeded entrance. For the occultists are practical folk. Not driven by vain curiosity, they are looking for tips. From the stars to forward transactions is but a nimble step. Usually the information amounts to no more than that some poor acquaintance has had his dearest hopes dashed.

IX. The cardinal sin of occultism is the contamination of mind and existence, the latter becoming itself an attribute of mind. Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else. The existent negates itself as thought upon itself. Such negation is mind's element. To attribute to it positive existence, even of a higher order, would be to deliver it up to what it opposes. Late bourgeois ideology has again made it what it was for pre-animism, a being-in-itself modelled on the social division of labour, on the split between manual and intellectual labour, on the planned domination over the former. In the concept of mind-in-itself consciousness has ontologically justified and perpetuated privilege by making it independent of the social principle by which it is constituted. Such ideology explodes in occultism: it is Idealism come full circle. Just by virtue of the rigid antithesis of being and mind, the latter becomes a department of being. If Idealism demanded solely on behalf of the whole, the Idea, that being be mind and that the latter exist, occultism draws the absurd conclusion that existence is determinate being: "Existence, after it has become, is always being with a non-being, so that this non-being is taken up in simple unity with the being. Non-being taken up in being, the fact that the concrete whole is in the form of being, of immediacy, constitutes determinateness as such."1 The occultists take literally the non-being in "simple unity with being", and their kind of concreteness is a surreptitious short-cut from the whole to the determinate which can defend itself by claiming that the whole, having once been determined, is no longer the whole. They call to metaphysics: Hic Rhodus hic salta: if the philosophic investment of spirit with existence is determinable, then finally, they sense, any scattered piece of existence must be justifiable as a particular spirit. The doctrine of the existence of the Spirit, the ultimate exaltation of bourgeois consciousness, consequently bore teleologically within it the belief in spirits, its ultimate degradation. The shift to existence, always "positive" and justifying the world, implies at the same time the thesis of the positivity of mind, pinning it down, transposing the absolute into appearance. Whether the whole objective world, as "product", is to be spirit, or a particular thing a particular spirit, ceases to matter, and the world-spirit becomes the supreme Spirit, the guardian angel of the established, despiritualized order. On this the occultists live: their mysticism is the enfant terrible of the mystical moment in Hegel. They take speculation to the point of fraudulent bankruptcy. In passing off determinate being as mind, or spirit, they put objectified mind to the test of existence, which must prove negative. No spirit exists. 1 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, Werke 5, p. 116 (Hegel's Science of Logic, London 1969, p. 110). Source:Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), section 151, pp. 238-244. The translation of this section has been republished in a collection of Adorno's essays, The Stars down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, ed. With an introduction by Stephen Cook (London; New York: Routledge, 1994).

14 comments:

This is horribly bigoted horseshit. Obviously Adorno knows nothing about Occultism and thinks it's all Aleister Crowley-style amoralism. The Spiritualists, apart from not actually being occultists, are as humanist, anti-racist, anti-sexist and morally consistant as the Quakers.

Nobody has ever been persecuted and injured by the Spiritualist churches, which is more than can be said for the eschatological death-cults that are Marxism and Maoism.

Spiritualism is one of the dumbest and most literal forms of occultism. Adorno tries to show the common structure of occult and Fascist thought. It shouldn't need spelling out that,obviously, that doesn't make all occultists Fascists by any means. Adorno's theses are connected to his long study of astrology charts (among other things). Finally, I have no idea why you cook up the nonsense at the end about Marxism as a 'death cult', and even throw in Maoism as if it had anything to do with Adorno. Aren't you doing there what you are complaining about otherwise?

Also, if Spiritualists aren't occultists (as you say) then why are you defending occultism?

That is a really bad article. Adorno was a racist himself, who wrote all kinds of condescendng nonsense about jazz being tribal jungle music for the primitives and so on.

And what are you talking about when you say that about Spiritualism? What a catch all generalisation. Spiritualism often appeals to very ordinary, every day people who have lost a loved one and visit mediums and so on. You'll find such groups in most UK cities, and indeed, probably in cities all over the world. 'Folk spiritualism' is popular everywhere from Algeria to Saudi to Korea.

Your blog is getting more and more mired in generalised trivia and obscure , aimless,marginalised pop culture with each posting.

Why do you waste time with these marginal figures? You'll be writing an article that takes that fool Johnathan Bowden seriously next.

Please at least do yourself the favour of reading Adorno before talking about him.

"Spiritualism often appeals to very ordinary, every day people"

So it does. There's a reason for that. Nevertheless, spiritualism is the grossest sort of mystification. There are plenty of things that appeal to "every day people" that are also profoundly wrong. What's th problem with saying that?

First, you need to stop throwing generalisations around : Define "spiritualism." If you define it as 'mysticism', well clarify *what sort* of 'mysticism.'

If you define it as 'folk religions', then clarify.

Secondly, why is "spiritualism... the grossest sort of mystification."

I can think of far worse sorts of 'mystification', and far more dangerous, damaging obscuring forms and ideologies.

What is your ultimate target here? The likes of Bowden, and Wakeford? There are far far more influential people out there doing far worse than these margianal men who probably appeal to a handful of fans in Krakow and a couple of disgruntled librarians in a huff in Bournemouth who read Evola.

@Thinking: I said 'mystification' not 'mysticism'. Spiritualism is not 'mysticism', it is far too bone-headedly stupid for that. I take 'spiritualism' to encompass a gross dualism of spirit and matter. It is mystifying because it treats spirit as a pure being-in-itself rather than as a social construction. Such dualism is an absolute barrier to... 'thinking'.

I don't understand commenters who argue that we should lay off the neo-Folk crypto-, neo-Fascists in order to tackle bigger problems. I suspect that it's simply a smokescreen to protect the people involved. I certainly find it impossible to take seriously in the absence of any idea from you of what these bigger, non-'marginal' problems are and what you are doing to combat them. Why do you want to protect these people?

I read Adorno many years ago, and certainly wouldn't waste my time doing so again. It is such pretentious, snobbish misguided elitist and dated twaddle. I think he's awful, besides a few chapters I definitely really benefited from. He is almost as bad az Zizek and Badiou, two other half baked twits , ready to peddle more post modern post Marxist crap to the gullible.

All that search produces is lots of people (mostly liberals and postmodernists) accusing Adorno of racism. As I suspected, there's nothing in Adorno himself to back this up. I've read most of Adorno's works in translation and I have never seen anything remotely racist there.

The argument is that Adorno didn't like the 'jazz' music of his time, therefore he was a racist since, it is assumed, the only reason to criticise that music is because of racism. That argument usually comes from postmodernists who believe that it's your duty to approve of popular music in principle.

My question was really rhetorical, challenging you to quote Adorno wherever it is that he proposes racist ideas. Feel free to do so if you really believe that he is a racist.

You are just recycling what academics and the liberal Left say about Adorno ('elitist', 'difficult', etc). It's got so bad these days that you can hardly mention him without someone immediately calling him 'elitist'. Mostly those people are getting their ideas second hand and have not bothered to actually read Adorno.

Ironically it's the critics of Adorn who are the real elitists - they think that the culture industry shouldn't be criticised because it is popular. Or, like you, they think spiritualism shouldn't be criticised because, as you said above, "Spiritualism often appeals to very ordinary, every day people". I find that deeply patronising to 'ordinary people'. If you think like that then it is impossible even to criticise capitalism (which is also widely accepted by 'ordinary people'). And that's what the critics really hate about Adorno - his revolutionary, critical ideas. Academics and liberals don't want capitalism and the culture industry criticised because they work for it. They want everyone to carry on listening to the same crap and worshipping the same Gods, because that helps keep everything as it is. To criticise all of that makes you 'elitist', because you can imagine that something else is possible.

"As I suspected, there's nothing in Adorno himself to back this up. I've read most of Adorno's works in translation and I have never seen anything remotely racist there."

I am sorry to say that I too, have read most of his stuff -- it was a horrible experience I wouldn't like to repeat; besides "Dialectic of Enlightenment/Enlightenment as Mass Deception" written with Horkheimer, which I found to be incredible. I still find it deeply relevant.I don't really care if Adorno was racist or not, but I do remember him writing some pompous uptight nonsense about jazz, which just looks dated now.

'postmodernists who believe that it's your duty to approve of popular music in principle.'

Besides Baudrillard and Lyotard, I hate Post Modernism. I think it is intentionally obscurantist, and a distraction. I spent years reading 'important texts'. most of which I think are laughable now,and I wouldn't waste any of my time reading it. Yes, I think there are some essential gems in there -- but how much nonsense do I have to wade through to find them? Is it worth it? In most cases, IMHO, no.

'You are just recycling what academics and the liberal Left say about Adorno ('elitist', 'difficult', etc). It's got so bad these days that you can hardly mention him without someone immediately calling him 'elitist'. Mostly those people are getting their ideas second hand and have not bothered to actually read Adorno.'

I am not of the 'liberal left' -- I am not 'of the left'; I have no interest in the 'left', and I have even less interest in the 'right.'

'Or, like you, they think spiritualism shouldn't be criticised because, as you said above, "Spiritualism often appeals to very ordinary, every day people". I find that deeply patronising to 'ordinary people'.'

Yes, but you haven't defined what YOU understand the term 'spiritualism' to mean. If you tell me, clearly, un-ambiguously -- then we can discuss it. And why do you find my use of the term 'ordinary people' offensive? I don't know about you, but I value 'ordinary people' far,far more than 'great men'. I'd far rather spend my time with 'ordinary people' than with the arrogant or 'important' people of our world, most of whom I avoid as much as I can.

' And that's what the critics really hate about Adorno - his revolutionary, critical ideas. Academics and liberals don't want capitalism and the culture industry criticised because they work for it. They want everyone to carry on listening to the same crap and worshipping the same Gods, because that helps keep everything as it is. To criticise all of that makes you 'elitist', because you can imagine that something else is possible.'

As I said, I have no argument with Adorno's work on 'the culture industry', most of which I consider to have set the benchmark of criticism in that area, and I believe to be essential reading.

@Thinking: I understand Spiritualism to involve a belief in the continued existence of the spirit after death. This soul/spirit is said to be able somehow to 'materialise'. In other words, spiritualism reifies the individuated personality and treats it as a special, mysterious kind of (indestructible) matter.

As Adorno says above, "Spirit is dissociated into spirits and thereby forfeits the power to recognize that they do not exist. The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon."

For the lost--the occult had a special significance for Adorno because the Nazis incorporated a good deal of this sort of thinking into their practice, and by the time he died, people in general were still very quick to call anything they didn't like fascist. Calling a man who died many decades ago "dated" is a tautology, in point of fact, and perhaps a man who was victimized by a very peculiar ideology should be allowed to be weary of it through his writings which, after all, have come down as a gift to posterity.

Adorno just doesn't seem like a good target for intelligent people to attack. He wrote his more complicated work in a high German style that was not uncommon at the time, and his compact aphorisms were characteristic of post-Hegelian philosophy. If at times it seems you're plodding through Eliot's Wasteland instead of Adorno, well, there is a reason for that. Dangerous ideologies often *appeal* to the educated, but it is the unreflective masses who carry them out. There are good reasons for his distrust of popular culture (he also distrusted much of high culture, as he recognized its origins in exploitation) and a theme of his writing is the increase of poverty in countries that are materially productive. He wasn't an elitist in effect, as he deplored the general unhappiness and struggle of the poor, and wanted them emancipated from such pressures so they could reflect on the best of what life has to offer. He knew damn sure it wasn't low-paid, hard work. Not that he ever did any himself.